Google Shutdowns Continue: iGoogle, Google Video, Google Mini... - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/03/google-shutdowns-continue-igoogle-google-video-google-mini-others-are-killed/ <comment><USER2> Why not link to Google's blog instead of TechCrunch?

[http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/spring-cleaning-in- su...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/spring-cleaning-in-summer.html)

<comment><USER3> In general I agree, but when in the specific case of blogspot I dislike seeing a blank white page when javascript is off.

<comment><USER4> Not even a "yo, dude this site needs javascript to work" message. Graceful degra-what?

<comment><USER5> Just white.

<http://imgur.com/J2w2s>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One way to look at all these shutdowns is that Google is on a hiring spree - for every one of these zombie projects they kill they get a bunch of engineers who are already vetted by Google's HR and are familiar with Google's dev processes.

<comment><USER7> How many people are honestly required to maintain iGoogle? Full time? One? Two if they browse the internet most of the day.

Just leave it up for christs sake. I wonder if this isn't about forcing people to other services.

Take the developers and let it keep going. No new commits, it works!

<comment><USER8> You are ignoring the cost of maintaining software. That is huge. "Working" is a relative term.

<comment><USER7> I'm not ignoring it at all. I'm just calling bullshit on the idea that the cost is anywhere near "huge".

1 developer, 75% time. That's it. If they are north of 2 developers they are doing something very wrong.

<comment><USER9> Even granting your premise, who wants to be the ONE developer stuck working on some project that clearly has no future?

<comment><USER10> Indeed, 1 google developer is going to be north of $100K/year, and if you're going to trust them to run a project, even a zombie one, probably significantly higher. Even worse is the loss of their expert advice and productivity on projects that actually deserve it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting that they are killing off iGoogle. One might hope there would be a Gplus theme for that home page that would duplicate it.

In the mean time it seems like a really really easy way to get about 10M uniques a month. I wonder if you implement an iGoogle clone on AE/CE and fund it with AdSense ads would they ban you?

I love the synergy of keeping a Google product alive on Google infrastructure but redirecting the money to someone willing to maintain it. Could be an interesting test case.

<comment><USER12> iGoogle has been my homepage for some time and is my window into numerous google properties (gmail, calendar, etc). This is an unwelcome change.

<comment><USER13> I've used it for years as well. I have Gmail and Google Calendar widgets, one for Hacker News, one for Reddit, and other news sites. It's a useful aggregator for all of the resources I use on the Web. I'll have to find a replacement before November of 2013.

<comment><USER14> I never found iGoogle too appealing because I find the interface messy, any idea what draws you to it? Is it just that it contains a bunch of RSS data?

<comment><USER15> Personally I use iGoogle daily simply because of the Gmail/Calendar integration (don't need to open anything else to see those) right on the first page I see when I open my browser. It allows me to start my day at one glance: new emails, daily events, and RSS feeds of overnight news. When I switched to it, I was previously using Netvibes. I switched because it loaded roughly 5x faster than Netvibes.

There are some things I don't like about it. The header is gigantic. I wish I could turn that off and add a few more feeds without needing to scroll. iGoogle has also been breaking a lot lately. I actually removed my Gmail feed simply because it never worked even though it was developed by Google themselves.

I'm sad to see it go, but it's better than the sorry state it's been in for the last few years.

<comment><USER16> _There are some things I don't like about it. The header is gigantic. I wish I could turn that off and add a few more feeds without needing to scroll._

That's what Super iGoogle is for.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ncindhlccodninkgio...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ncindhlccodninkgiofmmjdidmcmllhd)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I find these types of actions as very important to the culture of the company. It says we keep our house clean, we don't leave old things we tried lying around, and we acknowledge that some things work and some don't.

It may be negligible in terms of workforce impact, but it sends a signal that I think is very refreshing. Good for Larry, and good for the teams who now get to focus their energies elsewhere on something that might work. It beats spending time on something nobody cares about.

<comment><USER18> Disagree. What is good and often necessary for a start-up is not automatically necessary for a mammoth like Google. If you take all brain power of Google and focus it on Google plus, you get overheating, overengineering and other evils. The mammoth should have expandable parts, forgotten corners, people paid to do obscure work. They can't be a bunch of guerrilla teams and should do with it.

<comment><USER17> I get your sentiment, I find it depends entirely on the context. I don't think about it from a standpoint of focusing resources on a consolidated number of projects, but rather moving on to either expansions of those existing efforts or entirely new ones unto themselves.

A lot of that certainly depends on how they manage those things going forward. Ideally, these types of steps aren't surprises that come from some unknown management decision from on high, but a natural course of progression in project lifecycles.

I prefer the notion of sun-setting services if there is nothing left to learn from their creation/existence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Am I the only one who uses iGoogle?

I like having the weather in two different locations, top news stories by category, and my calendar for the next couple of days all conveniently on a single webpage.

Is there any viable alternative?

<comment><USER20> I just use Dashboard for that. Don't most platforms have desktop widgets?

<comment><USER15> The article claims people never close their browser (ridiculous, since Chrome updates every 15-20 minutes). I see my desktop a lot less often than I look at my homepage. Even when I close my browser, there's often another screen open behind it.

Besides, the benefit of iGoogle is you can see the same thing on every computer you visit. Can't do that with desktop widgets.

<comment><USER21> You just reminded me to check for Netflix popunders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Amazingly I use iGoogle every single day, many times per day. It collects my news and junk, hosts my frequent bookmarks, etc. Losing it is gonna suck -- hard. I simply don't have a replacement I like as much.

Have they finished moving the video from Google video over to youtube? If not why not? They've had _years_ to do so.

</comment><comment><USER23> Google Code shut down last new year. I have been missing it a lot. It was a search engine for code repositories and tarballs and had _a lot_ of stuff indexed. It had a nice Thompson regular expression search and an ability to filter by metadata like file name or programming language.

Google Code was very useful at giving me examples of how to do a certain thing. I've used it to search and compare different methods for matrix inversion, sought for examples on using certain API calls or samples of using a certain assembly intrinsic function.

GitHub's code search can do some of this but it's not a very good replacement. Has anyone got suggestions on good search engines for code?

<comment><USER24> Perhaps not maintained, but still around:

<http://code.google.com/codesearch>

For other hints, search for older articles on this topic on HN.

<comment><USER23> Finding this almost made my day, but not quite. It searches only code hosted at googlecode.com. The discontinued tool searched other hosting sites (sourceforge, github, etc) as well as tarballs found on the web. The search tool itself has improved, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I hadn't even heard of "google talk chatback"[1]. Isn't this essentially a the free version of Olark?

I'm simply surprised that Olark is so widespread, and yet I'd never come across this Google product which is older and extremely similar.

[1] -[http://googletalk.blogspot.com/2008/02/google-talk- chatback....](http://googletalk.blogspot.com/2008/02/google-talk- chatback.html)

</comment><comment><USER26> They are discontinuing Google Talk Chatback and the article says to use Meebo, but most of the Meebo services are being discontinued as well. What is a good alternative?

<comment><USER27> They're referring to the Meebo chatbar, the one Meebo service they aren't killing off.

<comment><USER28> It appears that the meebo chat requires the visitor to your site to login to their Google account or meebo account to make it work. This is a very large obstacle to engagement. The google chatback would let anonymous users chat with you.

<comment><USER26> Exactly. Plus you could just link to a chat - you didn't need an annoying bar or plugin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Oh, how I do hope Page Speed is killed in the next batch. Either kill it or explain how it is calculated and its relevance to SEO.

</comment><comment><USER30> This sucks. I, like several of you here, use iGoogle as my homepage. It's been my homepage since iGoogle came out in 2005. Portals make excellent homepages, so I'm not sure what Google is getting at here. I just tried Netvibes. It's ok, but dangit, it's not Google + widgets. I foresee writing a ton of userscripts to get my experience back.

</comment><comment><USER31> Shame... There are some old Charlie Rose interviews on Google Video (about Kubrick and Apple) that I wanted to download in a few days (tech crunch doesn't load for me right now so I don't know if Google video is shut down for good, or is in the process of getting shut down and videos are still up).

<comment><USER28> [http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2012/07/google-video- cont...](http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2012/07/google-video-content- moving-to-youtube.html)

TUESDAY, JULY 3, 2012 Google Video content moving to YouTube Later this summer, all remaining hosted video on Google Video will be moved to YouTube. Google Video stopped taking uploads in May 2009 and now we're moving the remaining hosted content to YouTube as private videos. Google Video users can rest assured that you won't be losing any of your content as it will be fully available on YouTube, and you can choose to make those videos public on YouTube if you'd like.

If you would prefer to migrate, delete or download your content yourself, you can do so by visiting the Google Video status page prior to August 20, 2012

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Google Video is not the same as YouTube -- it's video search that includes videos from external websites. Is YouTube going to start indexing external videos, or is there just going to be a video void for finding this stuff?

<comment><USER33> No, the Google Video the article refers to is a google hosting service for videos that directly competes with youtube. But you haven't been able to upload new videos to there since 2009. The video search will remain unaffected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> iGoogle is my home page. It shows lots of RSS feeds. Its the first place I see HN for example. Clearly with that page as my home page I naturally use google search.

I guess my use of google will up for grabs, I will have to now set my home page to something else. If that has an integrated search engine, and its not google, then bye bye google.

I am utterly amazed by this. Google are going to literally tell me not use them any more. Quite possibly a good thing from my POV. Being so tied in and then being given a forced out like this is potential gold.

</comment><comment><USER35> It's been on life support for years.

Pro tip: If your favorite app hasn't changed anything in years, it's not because it's perfect. It's because no one is working on it other than keeping the lights on.

</comment><comment><USER36> "The service dates back to a time when homepage portals were people's entry points to the Internet."

In many parts of the world, portals are still hugely important... Yahoo is #1 in Japan, for example.

<comment><USER37> Though Yahoo Japan is backed by Google: <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/technology/28yahoo.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> And this is why it's bad practice to rely on third party vendors for things you actually need. Support OSS and stop this cloud nonsense.

I'm dreaming of a day when everyone owns a server.

</comment><comment><USER39> I have been using igoogle everyday for years.

I'm upset that google is discontinuing igoogle.

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't "love" iGoogle, but I have grown into it, all my stuff is there now, after 5 years.

</comment><comment><USER41> I hope they are not going to shutdown Google Reader in favor of G+.

</comment><comment><USER42> iGoogle was like the first thing in a long time they did that I actually liked and used. Today is a sad day, at least for my homepage.

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands A bit disappointed about them killing igoogle. I used to use as a great SEO tactic to increase people's page rank. Even if the site was brand new, you get put a link on a person's igoogle page and like clockwork within 24-48 hours they'd be in the SERPS, usually within the first three pages.

I don't do much SEO any more so I'm wondering how effective it really is now.

<comment><USER43> I'm guessing this is the real reason why Google is killing off iGoogle...

<comment><USER44> Love your tinfoil hat, there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I have 2 primary sites I visit constantly (always have a tab open), with a 3rd site I visit once a day to maybe once a week: Reddit, HN then Quora.

I have never used iGoogle... and the portal era is past for me.

I prefer google video over youtube though.

I can't stand the fact that on any youtube page the video is such a small portion of the screen real estate. Google video at least made the damn video the primary eye catcher.

While im on this little youtube rant - "related" videos and the damn in vid popups are a farking joke.

If there is one place that google can get disrupted (on the UX) its youtube.

<comment><USER46> Have you tried the "feather" UI from the Youtube Labs/beta page?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> they can shutdown iGoogle when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.</comment>


That party was way worse than it sounds - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@paulbiggar/that-party-was-way-worse-than-it-sounds-29f4a3c7e4b8 <comment><USER2> Here's a blackhat business model:

1\. Be an attractive woman

2\. Get a number of spy cameras and invites these parties

3\. Get photos of the richest people in SV in compromising positions

4\. Move to your favorite non-extradition country.

5\. Extort them over TOR for $1M in Bitcoin or else you'll release the pictures to all of their families, partners, boards, clients, and tech blogs.

<comment><USER3> Wasn't this basically episode 2 of season 3 of "Black Mirror"?

<comment><USER2> Pretty much :-D

Extorting them to do specific actions would certainly be more interesting. If you could get dirt on 1% of SV's 1%, you could use their power to change the region significantly.

<comment><USER4> I wish I thought it was so easy and simple to make the world a better place. The idea of being a kind of modern Mata Hari has a certain appeal, but seems pretty unrealistic.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN:  Who are the biggest personalities in the Valley? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> By this I mean in-person - biggest egos, funniest, most charismatic.

Off the top of my head - Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Adeo Ressi, Mike Arrington...who else?

<comment><USER2> Are you going to classify that list you put out?

What characteristics are you associating with each of them?

<comment><AUTHOR> Jobs = charisma and hyperbole Ressi = language and ego Musk = visionary (though haven't met personally) Ellison = force of will

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> To this I would add - "and why"</comment>


Covid-19 and Human Irrationality - <AUTHOR> https://www.younglingfeynman.com/essays/covid <comment><USER2> >While I'm not particularly interested in pandemics, I do find it an interesting and unique opportunity to observe human behavior.

I too am also a robot who's so logical that I'm above any form of human bias or irrationality. I observe these covid-19 events around the world and find it interesting because I'm too analytical. That's my main problem, I'm so analytical that I like to pretend I'm better than humans and pretend I find human behavior "interesting" when really I'm just being a dumb human myself in pretending.

<comment><AUTHOR> hahha while it's a bit of a bummer that I gave you that impression, you did make me laugh! Thanks for your feedback though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Who is the author and what are their credentials? Imho, this article bases a lot of it's logic on if so facto statements about human behavior which could be argued. I got a strong: "The world is either black or white" vibe from it.

<comment><USER4> Oh, you're not familiar with startup marketing growth hacker / the world's latest COVID-19 expert, RJ Youngling?

[https://i.imgur.com/VwgIQJZ.png](https://i.imgur.com/VwgIQJZ.png)

This is pretty clearly content marketing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that it's content marketing in the sense that I try to write things that others find worthwhile. It's not content marketing in the sense that I whip together a quick listicle. Thanks for your feedback though. I'm sorry you didn't enjoy it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a very weird evaluation: It describes a post mortem on all of humanity from a site that, from what I can see, is mostly an entrepreneurship op-ed e-zine?

Certain points are also reflect a strange dissociation or at least misunderstandings of the very thing the essay appears to be describing as interesting to evaluate. For an essay describing human behavioral analysis, the writer appears to look down on emergent human behavior like elbow-bumping. Its analysis of individual rationality vs irrationality is incredibly silly- it is far more rational to evaluate the circumstance to understand that a systemic risk exists and to encourage systemic action as well as individual action than it is to hoard-buy toilet paper.

</comment><comment><USER6> One thing that is fascinating me is where to draw the line between forgiving an understandable delay, and really blaming leadership for an unforgivable delay. Like, I am seeing blame for the us administration not preparing or responding more quickly to public knowledge in mid-february, but... what percentage of us had the forethought to divest our retirement accounts at that time? (I'm not looking for bragging anecdotes here, my point is that most people didn't.) There's a point at which anyone is _somewhat_ certain that _something_ bad is happening or about to happen, without having any sense of intensity or speed, where there's a certain level of human reaction delay. So is there a good standard for when it is no longer forgivable human/societal behavior, and becomes truly egregious cruelty, willful ignorance, and blame- worthy incompetence?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's indeed fascinating. Any such line will always have an element of arbitrariness. I.e. Pick duration Y. Then why not Y+1 or Y-1.

That being said. Pandemics are highly predictable and where I live (Europe) we had the benefit of seeing different approaches being used by different countries with varying degrees of success (Taiwan v. Italy).

There are measures (such as air travel restriction) where we know they're not that effective (although they do buy you some time). There are measures (such as social distancing and being early and aggressive in closing schools and other facilities) that are known to be more effective.

I think the line can be drawn where one has sufficient information to act quickly and still refuses to do so.

In government's (limited) defense. Exponentials are highly counterintuitive, so it's understandable the right thing feels strange.

The right time to implement measures is precisely when everything 'feels fine'. That, coupled with political blowback and economical impact serves as a constraint to quick action IMO. [1]

I'm by no means an expert in this field. I merely study human behavior in the context of business. So with a little luck, an epidemiologist will chime in.

[1] I suspect that there's 1 other bias that plays a role. Namely, what doesn't occur is harder to quantify than that which does. E.g. The FDA might pull a drug and save lives as a result. On the flip side, the lives that are lost because certain drugs take years and years to market are hard to measure. There are virtually no consequences for The FDA regarding the lives that are lost by being slow. There are massive consequences for the lives that are lost by approving a bad drug. Now imagine that the harder to quantify lives lost due to slowness exceeds those due to bad drugs. That would mean The FDA had a negative net-effect yet it would feel positive due to this bias.

<comment><USER6> Regarding your footnote, I think that also applies to our state Governors. I don't think they have the advantage of federally classified briefings, so they're reacting to public analysis and the situation on the ground.

For instance, Oregon has implemented distancing and stay-in-place fairly early (apparently) in the state's outbreak. But Oregon is also surrounded by WA and CA, which maybe made it easier to do so.

A landlocked state in the south surrounded by other states that aren't taking it seriously might find it much more difficult to get buy-in for making those decisions.

Then you have states like Florida where it seems incredibly obvious they should have taken steps before now.

<comment><AUTHOR> ''so they're reacting to public analysis and the situation on the ground.''

Your analysis describes (more eloquently than mine) what I think is going on as well.

It would appear to me that that public buy-in specifically is what makes acting early challenging.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I did an HN post this morning about Disney having the best day in company history yesterday...there is no rationality or reason for this, and sorry to every HNer I already mentioned the Keynes quote about the market remaining irrational longer than investors remaining liquid.

But seriously we have so much in the way of resources, but instead the millionaires and billionaires are investing in a cartoon mouse and company that runs theme parks, hotels and cruise ships that will not only remain closed for the foreseeable future, but when they do open people will not risk going.

Its not just the public companies either, look at the university systems. Between just the top 10 schools with the largest endowments and they have collectively over $250B stashed away. 10 non-profits have $250B, they have labs and they have researchers at the ready...but how much of that money are they spending to combat this? How many of these brilliant minds are at work in the labs?

I won't even get into the government response...all you need to do it look at the President of the US who accepts and promotes medication based on his feelings and hopes and shuts down actual medical experts. It is all so ridiculous believing this is a manufactured conspiracy would almost be easier to accept than what is actually happening right now. But when you are dead, you will be glad you bought that Disney stock for under $100/share, it is after all a once in a lifetime opportunity.

<comment><AUTHOR> The most fascinating thing to me is to see how diametrically opposed reactions from different countries are. Especially those that have experienced SARS v. those that didn't.</comment></comment>


UK: Aaron Schwartz style prosecution was "undue pressure" and SAS man released - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-21767681

<comment><USER2> This has nothing to do with Aaron Swartz and has nothing in common with his case.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> >> Lord Judge said: "The question is whether the uninvited indication [of likely sentence] by the judge and its consequent impact on the defendant created improper pressure and narrowed his freedom of choice.

>> "We rule that it did and therefore order the conviction to be quashed."</comment>


Startup Quote: Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder, GitHub - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/2513174161

<comment><AUTHOR> When I'm old and dying, I plan to look back on my life and say "wow, that was an adventure," not "wow, I sure felt safe."

\- Tom Preston-Werner (@mojombo)

<http://startupquote.com/post/2513174161></comment>


Strace - The Sysadmin's Microscope - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/entry/strace_the_sysadmin_s_microscope <comment><USER2> It's also worth looking at SystemTap or DTrace, depending on what OS you're running. While strace will allow you to look at an individual process and its children, SystemTap/DTrace will allow you to gather data on system call (and then some) usage system wide. Some examples:

\- monitor execve() calls system-wide

\- monitor I/O to a specific file, from any process

\- measure per-process network usage

(note that newer Linux kernels may have other ways of accomplishing some of these tasks that I'm not aware of).

I've had a lot of success using SystemTap to look at low-level filesystem performance issues in the kernel. We've run SystemTap scripts on our production filesystem servers for over a year with no problems whatsoever.

Edit: formatting

<comment><USER3> On a current Linux system, you can monitor several of the items you mention using "perf".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also very useful: ltrace.

ltrace is like strace, but does library calls instead of system calls.

</comment><comment><USER5> strace tip #31415927: If your program is I/O bound, sometimes you can improve performance by increasing the size of the read buffer. A bigger buffer means fewer system calls and potentially increased performance. How do you know how big the read buffer is? Sometimes it's hard to tell even if you have the source (i.e. you're using stdio). With strace you can see the number of bytes you're trying to slurp in with each read system call. If it looks like a small number, you can then go figure out how to make it a bigger number, perhaps using setvbuf or rolling your own buffered I/O.

<comment><USER6> Yes, buffer size can have a significant effect on performance. You can quickly see buffer sizes used by "read" across your system with "dtrace -n 'syscall::read:entry{ @ = quantize(arg2); }'", which summarizes the output (in case you're doing more of these than you can reasonably see in the console) and has significantly less impact on the program you're tracing. Output for my system:

               value  </comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>- Distribution </comment><comment></comment><comment>- count
                   0 |                                         0
                   1 |@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@  1278
                   2 |                                         0
                   4 |                                         0
                   8 |                                         0
                  16 |                                         0
                  32 |                                         0
                  64 |                                         0
                 128 |                                         0
                 256 |                                         0
                 512 |                                         1
                1024 |                                         0
                2048 |@                                        20
                4096 |                                         2
                8192 |                                         0
               16384 |                                         0
               32768 |                                         0
               65536 |                                         3
              131072 |                                         2
              262144 |                                         1
              524288 |                                         0

and if you want to know where, say, the 512-byte reads are coming from:

# dtrace -n 'syscall::read:entry/arg2 == 512/{ @[ ustack() ] = count(); }'

      mdworker
                  libSystem.B.dylib`read+0xa
                  Foundation`-[NSConcreteFileHandle readDataOfLength:]+0x1d6
                  RichText`GetMetadataForURL+0x338
                  mdworker`0x100006a66
                  mdworker`0x100009ec1
                  libSystem.B.dylib`_pthread_start+0x14b
                  libSystem.B.dylib`thread_start+0xd
                    1

</comment><comment><USER7> For those of you on the Mac that doesn't have strace but does have dtrace, here are some preinstalled dtrace scripts you have at your fingertips:

dtruss - similar to strace opensnoop - all files nettop - all network access iosnoop/iotop - all io execsnoop - all new processes errinfo - all system calls resulting in errors

Not exactly the same info but I think much more powerful as it is system wide and you call always filter out what you don't need to know, or write your own scripts!

</comment><comment><USER8> I use strace all the time (and ltrace too)... I honestly don't know how people get by without it...

BTW, the Windows equivalent is called "Process Monitor" from the SysInternals guy...

</comment><comment><USER9> What are the args to make Mac OS's "dtrace" behave like "strace" does when given no options?

<comment><USER10> Look at dtruss.

Unfortunately you need to "sudo" to use it, since dtrace needs root permsisions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Helped my trouble shoot why sudo was taking 25+ seconds yesterday. Apparently it was timing out attempting to perform some NIS operations on a misconfigured setup.

<comment><USER12> I've had this issue too, apparently it used to completely fail if the hostname lookup failed even if your sudoers didn't talk about hostnames at all: <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sudo/+bug/32906>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone know of anything that will parse the output of strace or dtrace. What I'd like to do is generate a graph of my pipeline showing which program calls which other program, how long does it take to get back, which files it uses, etc.

I think it would be a great visualization to go along with my documentation.

<comment><USER2> A little Googling turned up this (definitely not the original source, though):

[https://github.com/CyanogenMod/android_external_strace/blob/...](https://github.com/CyanogenMod/android_external_strace/blob/gingerbread/strace- graph)

      $ strace  -tt -q -o graph.strace -s 100 -f bash -c 'ls |wc -l'
      $ ./strace-graph graph.strace
      bash -c ls |wc -l
        +-- ls
        `-- wc -l

The comments in the code claim it will show elapsed time for each process, but that's not working for me.

I discovered the Python ptrace module while I was searching for this. I have a project for which modifying the Python module might be a nice alternative to parsing strace output.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> OS X has a fancy GUI for this called Instruments.

(Obviously the cmdline tools are there as well.)

<comment><USER15> Instruments is a frontend to dtrace, I think the closest equivalent to strace on OS X is dtruss.

Additionally, OS X has several useful stock dtrace scripts, check 'apropos dtrace' for a listing

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone know of a usable (no sudo needed) strace for Darwin / OS X?

<comment> brown9-2 This is a tangent but why is sudo needed != usable?

<comment><USER16> I cannot think of a single time when I'm debugging an errant program when I would like to have it run as root. I can however think of many things, like debugging permission issues, resource limit issues, reading and writing files, etc where it makes a big difference to run as root. I know you can su and then su back to yourself, but that's a pain and things aren't exactly the same anymore, i.e. there is a usability problem.

<comment><USER17> Your can send your complaints to Apple and hope that they fix it, or use free software that doesn't do stupid things like this. IMO, you kind of forfeited your right to complain when you started using non-free software.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Timeline of the 2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%9320_Wuhan_coronavirus_outbreak <comment><AUTHOR> Here are two excellent Youtube videos by a British doctor taking the time to explain published research

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z05ZrMfKUDc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z05ZrMfKUDc) Feb 2 that covers forecast of actual case count based on [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\(20\)30260-9/fulltext)

"Nowcasting and forecasting the potential domestic and international spread of the 2019-nCoV outbreak originating in Wuhan, China: a modelling study"

        Prof Joseph T Wu, PhD *
        Kathy Leung, PhD *
        Prof Gabriel M Leung, MD
        Show footnotes

Published:January 31, 2020

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WLk- Mxydrk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WLk-Mxydrk) covers factors that determine how long coronavirus can live outside on a surface. answer is days to weeks if out of direct sunlight / indoors, with higher temperature shortening lifetime.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is a link to recent SSRN papers on coronavirus [https://www.ssrn.com/index.cfm/en/coronavirus/](https://www.ssrn.com/index.cfm/en/coronavirus/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is a MAP/GIS view "Wuhan Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Global Cases (by Johns Hopkins CSSE)" [https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...](https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is a graph of cases and deaths plotted either log or linear. [https://coronaviruschart.com/](https://coronaviruschart.com/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's a well researched page that gets dynamically updated with new info. One we may be watching for a few weeks if we are lucky, a few months if we are not.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> this link scans for most recent pre-print articles [https://www.biorxiv.org/search/2019-nCoV%20numresults%3A10%2...](https://www.biorxiv.org/search/2019-nCoV%20numresults%3A10%20sort%3Apublication- date%20direction%3Adescending)</comment>


Turkey unveils first fully domestically-produced car in $3.7B bet on electric - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-autos/new-turkish-electric-car-project-investment-seen-at-3-7-billion-idUSKBN1YV09E <comment><USER2> I gotta say this makes a surprising amount of sense.

\- Turkey is the perfect size for a relatively beefy electric car battery to make through in one charge, effectively removing the range anxiety.

\- This car will likely be immediately competitive in at least the Turkish market because Turkish taxes are crazy on transport. Gasoline is taxed at ~70%, cars are taxed at 68% (50% + 18% VAT). A domestic car will probably avoid the 50% on purchase and a domestic electric car will entirely avoid taxes on gas. Taxes make this a good deal at almost any price the average Turkish consumer can buy.

\- With the current very low, out of whack exchange rate (1USD:6TRY) this will also become competitive in at least Southern European markets fairly fast as well.

\- Since this is government sponsored they can also do a fairly fast rollout of electric charging stations by offering generous incentives. If that doesn't work, they have the eminent domain hammer, and they will definitely just build it themselves as part of the electric service.

\- This also avoids the heavy industry required to build ICE cars, which has environmental costs. That cause is becoming popular with the electorate as well, exemplified in the stiff backlash against the country's first nuclear reactor.

\- Lastly, Turkey has been building cars for the past 35 years and it's gotten pretty good at it - many of the entry to mid level marques of European conglomerates are built in Turkish factories. This is an entry into luxury segment, it is _not_ an entry into car manufacturing. That knowledge of being able to build safe and solid European cars already exists in there. If you've visited Europe, you likely already ridden a Turkish-made car (taxis) and if you live in Europe, chances are you might own one without knowing.

\- As a bonus point, I would say the choice of an Italian designer over a Turkish one bodes well for the effort because somebody actually made a level headed, reasoned call on this and not a nationalistic one.

<comment><USER3> If Turkey intends to sell domestic cars at lower taxes than imported / ones manufactured by foreign companies in Turkey, then it can expect repercussions in its free trade deals with other countries.

Not that Erdogan couldn't have such arrogant ideas, but it's not going to fly like that.

Also, I don't get that idea about Turkey being perfect size for making through its area with an electric car. Turkey is not a small country, Istanbul-Ankara is 450 km, Ankara-Gaziantep is 700 km, and that's not yet even close to "through" the country. Not that this is necessarily so relevant.

<comment><USER4> They don't have to do anything special. Once it's made in their country, import duties a will not be applied, just like it works everywhere else.

That is a significant discount on the price.

<comment><USER5> So far, these are taxes, not tariffs. If they want to charge it to only foreign cars, then they would be tariffs. If they are tariffs, then that will fuck their trade deals, and their domestic car industry. Which they are not in position to suffer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a lot more information and photos here: [https://www.motor1.com/news/390036/turkey-togg-csuv-ev- autom...](https://www.motor1.com/news/390036/turkey-togg-csuv-ev-automobile/)

> Customers can choose from two different lithium-ion battery setups. The > smaller option promises 186 miles while the larger pack should crack 300 > miles per charge.

> TOGG says the rear-drive model can hit 62 miles per hour in 7.6 seconds. The > dual-motor SUV will do the deed in 4.8 seconds.

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting to see so many new entrants to the car manufacturing market. I guess internal combustion manufacturing was so dominated by the big boys in US-DE-JP that no one really had the muscle/margins to get into the fight at that point. From what I've gleamed, electric motors are a lot simpler (less moving parts).

<comment><USER8> I lately saw presentation of VW also claiming how EV is several times "simpler" and "less parts", and then the next slide was that their next gen similar size car is "only" about 2 times more expensive than ICE. 2 times simpler should convert to 2 times cheaper also, or what I miss here? Lithium is so expensive nowadays?

<comment><USER9> No, lithium price makes very little difference to lithium battery price. All those "industry analysts" from McKinseys and such suggesting it have never set their foot in a battery factory.

The biggest price components of lithium cells is cobalt oxide used in cathode plates, followed by nickel in cell chemistries using them. Both are not cheap at all, and their supply is famously unstable. Metallurgical cobalt goes at $30-40 per kilo in China, and battery grade cobalt oxide at almost the same price.

So for a 200kg battery pack, you will be paying 2000-3000$ only for the cathode material.

Second after this is plainly volumes. Tooling costs are very high. Even model 3 and BAIC EU are rather low volume by industry standards. You have to add to that that EVs don't share chassis/platform with any other high volume car, and thus can't share the bodywork tooling costs.

<comment><USER10> We start to see platform sharing between thermal and electric. E.g. Peugeot new e-208 have very high part commonality with regular 208.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Honestly, think they stand a pretty good chance in making it successful, especially considering how good their domestic home appliance capabilities has become. Different things, but atleast the embedded systems/electrical engineering talent is there.

<comment><USER12> I'm from Turkey, this is just a show for always upcoming elections. Best engineers in Turkey already left the ship, and the remaining is looking for a way out

<comment><USER13> Hey, I'm a Turk left the ship 6 years ago. Turkey has infinite amount of engineer supply. I'm also sure the remaining can handle this.

<comment><USER14> "Turkey has infinite amount of engineer supply"

That seems unlikely.

<comment><USER15> 7000000 country could probably produce more engineering talent than it can utilize. And building everyday cars is somewhat easy compared to the aerospace, weapons, nuclear reactors or big dams/bridges/tunnels - you don't push neither material science nor laws of physics to the limit.

<comment><USER16> Regressive fascists don't tend to reach their potential engineering quality.

Take that number. Subtract all women and Kurds, people who speak critically of the government. Adjust for the academics held as political prisoners and brain drained talent.

That's your engineering base. You can't square the engineering circle when your government is actively engaged in repressing the population.

<comment><USER17> German engineers during WWII seems to refute this claim. History shows that talented engineers drafted machines of mass murder with smile, as long as it would fund their departments and I'm sure there were other considerations in their decision to comply as well.

<comment><USER18> Many world leading scientists fled Germany after 1933: [https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.4.2018092...](https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.4.20180926a/full/)

And 15% of the scientists that we're fired from universities were responsible for 64% of academic citations.

Also, many ways Germany had the inferior war technology and progress: encryption. nuclear. Soviet tanks we're better. Germany didn't have long range bombers. British anti-aircraft systems were better.

And all that from a country that led the world in science and engineering before WWII.

<comment><USER19> "Also, many ways Germany had the inferior war technology and progress: encryption. nuclear. "

But superior in conventional warfare at the beginning of WW2. Stukas, tanks and infanterie well (radio) coordinated.

MG42, the basemodel is still in use as MG3 today

Also later: ME262 (first jet engine), STG44 (first assault rifle), V1 and V2 (rockets)

So given the size, german wartechnology was very advanced.

But it was because this was the sole focus of the ruling nazi party: war tech.

Basic university research is about anything and mostly civilian and the nazis were no academics: they cared about war technology and "scientific" proof, that the aryans are superior. So they did not feel the loss of the fleeing jewish based intellectuals so hard.

"And all that from a country that led the world in science and engineering before WWII."

And this statement is probably more likely true before WWI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So, they (reportedly) commissioned Pininfarina to do the design work, as a "joint design team" with the TOGG folks, but based on the fit/finish of the interior (and the design choices) it kind of looks like Pininfarina did the actual manufacturing of this concept car.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it might be a bit early to call this a "fully homemade car".

<comment><USER21> I have to say I'm shocked to hear that Pininfarina could have designed something so ungainly, dull, and almost ugly.

They're one of the greatest design / coachbuilding companies in automotive history. This just looks like a generic block of soap from a nameless factory.

I wonder what happened.

<comment><USER22> Sedan looks pretty cool. Elaborate on how the cars look ungainly,dull and ugly please.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm old enough to remember the last "first fully homemade Turkish car". It was named Imza (Turkish for signature). I don't remember the specifics but it was total flop with some financial fraud in the mix. Hoping for a better result this time.

</comment><comment><USER24> There were companies who are selling the same template with different color plate to the customers and lying about they designed from scratch. It seems Italians did the same.

[https://www.motor1.com/news/390097/togg-suv-sedan-concept- pi...](https://www.motor1.com/news/390097/togg-suv-sedan-concept-pininfarina/)

<comment><USER25> Pininfarina is a famous Italian company that designs cars for manufacturers.

<comment><USER24> I know that part, the weird part is they gave Turkish government a predesigned car for another customer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've been traveling in Turkey few months ago. Was extremely impressed by the resources this vast country have and by the wealth its citizens (in Istanbul) used to have.

Turkey have healthy infrastructure to develop these kind of industry. I believe that they can afford paying top talents from all over the world to come there and boost this industry

</comment><comment><USER27> One of the things that technology enables is lower barriers to entry. In the past, you had to be horizontally integrated to make a car. Even Tesla, to some extent is massively horizontally integrated as they are first movers.

Technology enables global supply chains. Electric cars may have fewer moving parts. The result is a "narrower" approach to integration where you can rely on others for important or critical parts.

Assuming they can make this car reliable and cheap - the makers only need to focus on marketing and selling to make it successful.

<comment><USER28> Did you mean vertically integrated?

<comment><USER27> Yes - sorry - long week!

I meant vertically integrated, meaning a car company needs to control their supply chain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Completely new platform from completely inexperienced vendor, mass produced, with more shiny tech than the major car manufacturers have today combined (lvl 3 AD, augmented reality, V2X, eye tracking, holographic assistant?, etc). All done in 2 years...good luck. No doubt they might get a car out eventually but it wont be the car advertised here and the timeplan is still very optimistic.

</comment><comment><USER30> Where are they getting the batteries?

Electric cars are an extremely simple, mature technology that is decades old. Building one isn't hard. The real trick is high volume production of high capacity lithium ion batteries, and the associated pack technology. This is why the Europeans are still massively behind Japan, Korea, and the US (Tesla) with EVs. They can't get enough cells to manufacture cars in high enough volume to be profitable, because they are simply buying them from LG Chem and Panasonic.

If Turkey isn't investing billions into battery production, then the whole endeavor is a pointless prestige project.

<comment><USER31> Zorlu Enerji (It's a well known Turkish energy company as well as part of the TOGG) already invested 4.5 billion USD to build up a battery factory together with Chinese GSR Capital.

BTW, It is not new, it was some years ago IIRC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> 3.7bn over 13 years? There's no way that anything will become of this. Of course, that's not the point. I suspect that exactly one car will ever be made, the car that the despot Erdegon will get to drive in for the cameras.

<comment><USER33> And well off westerners will praise him for it ... see this thread - just an announcement and everyone is practically falling over themselves to pile on the praise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> So what will german / italian companies do if they see that their "china" (manufacturing base) is making its own brand?

</comment><comment><USER35> "Elon Musk did it, so...."

</comment><comment><USER36> On a tangent: Why hasn't Tata (India) tried to enter the American markets? They're a huge shop (they've got a ton of engineering branches just like GE or LG), and I realize a lot of their car production is tied up domestically or to Africa where their industrial their vehicles are big, but surely they've have to had considered selling cars in Europe/the US? They have a US engineering/consulting presence already and even do large scale government contracts (although they require US citizens for those .. which is .. a weird hybrid when you think about it), but we don't see any of their cars in the US.

<comment><USER37> Tata owns Jaguar Land Rover so they're already in the US and Europe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Devrim was the first one (and had more style to it), but there were only 4 of them produced:

[http://devrimarabasi.com/galeri/big/siyahbeyaz/siyahbeyazdev...](http://devrimarabasi.com/galeri/big/siyahbeyaz/siyahbeyazdevrim62.jpg)

[http://devrimarabasi.com/galeri/big/siyahbeyaz/siyahbeyazdev...](http://devrimarabasi.com/galeri/big/siyahbeyaz/siyahbeyazdevrim54.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER39> It's over for combustion engine cars. Bring on electric competition.

</comment><comment><USER40> I hope one day cars will be the next "tower computer" in that you can buy your motors, shell, seats, OS (and self driving AI), all separately and just put them together. It would be very cool to see companies that just specialize in making different bodies, companies making different frames, but all working with a standardized blueprint.

I think the first iteration of THAT would be a huge boon to the economy.

</comment><comment><USER41> Who better to provide innovation and challenge Tesla than an autocratic government and a committee of random companies?

<comment><USER42> You may want to do your own research, not random companies. This gov support model has proven successful with defense companies in TR, they're moving it to the mobility industry for the first time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I believe Elon Musk deserves credit for inspiring people thousands of miles away. -Over 100K guaranteed sales -Free land allocation for 1M m2 -100% tax cut -Massive interest rate cut for financing -2 SUVs and 1 Sedan in 2022 -Concept designs were made by Pininfarina

</comment><comment><USER43> By today's standards it's a pretty car. I'm way over the Lamborghini style front end scoops but this has much softer lines compared to most right now and it's nice.

</comment><comment><USER44> he drove it today on live broadcast: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1Cu4dPNLok](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1Cu4dPNLok)

<comment><USER45> seems surprisingly polished, really curious as to how they pulled this off -- they're making it look easy

<comment><USER46> Easy, the prototype has been brought from Italy. Nothing has been made yet in Turkey.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> May it be unlike Erke Dönergeci, a fraudulent group that attempted to produce a perpertual motion machine.

</comment><comment><USER48> I think I'll pass on contributing to Erdogan's genocide funding

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't understand what about this car is "homemade." The headline doesn't make any sense. And if it does, it's in a paternalistic (maybe racist?) sort of way.

</comment><comment><USER49> > Erdogan first revealed plans in November 2017 here to launch a car made > entirely in Turkey by 2021.

Electric cars are much simpler then conventional combustion engine cars... no transmission needed.

I'm glad that Elon was not successful in putting a transmission in the Tesla car.</comment>


Americans should drink more coffee - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/02/21/its-official-americans-should-drink-more-coffee/ <comment><USER2> Is it possible to see how much if any money was given to the committee from the coffee industry?

[http://www.health.gov/dietaryguidelines/committee/#members](http://www.health.gov/dietaryguidelines/committee/#members)

<comment><USER3> Was my first thought, too, after reading about the link between the sugar industry and those early sugar studies.

Seems to me like the scientific community should be overly open about its sources of funding, conflicts of interest, etc if it wants to maintain public trust going forward.

<comment><USER4> It is. Typically if you publish in a _respected_ and _peer reviewed_ journal, you are required to disclose sources of funding in the article. Especially if those sources include for-profit companies, you're in for a world of hurt if you don't.

But the "scientific community", so far as such a thing exists, can't censure news reports, government reports, or corporate reports that claim "X is true because science". It also cannot stop someone from publishing a "scientific" journal.

"Science" is not a Trade Mark, and scientists cannot solve for clueless consumers who believe everything if you say "because science!" Especially when those same consumers fail to fund / pay attention in quality post-secondary science education.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >it's unlikely to do anything other than make you more alert and awake.

I find that extremely hard to believe.

If I drink 5 cups of coffee per day I get heart palpitations, an upset stomach, and am extremely irritable in general. The same goes for my significant other.

I actually went to a heart specialist and wore a heart monitor for 48 hours last year because I was having an irregular heartbeat and would black-out occasionally after jumping up out of a chair. The diagnosis? I'm fine. I just need to ingest less caffeine.

I think I'll stick with my one cup per day, below average amount.

It's just enough to wake up me, keep me alert, without any of the negative effects that caffeine brings with it.

</comment><comment><USER6> OTOH:

[http://www.inc.com/travis-bradberry/caffeine-the-silent- kill...](http://www.inc.com/travis-bradberry/caffeine-the-silent-killer-of- success.html)

Claims: caffeine only improves mental performance in those habituated to caffeine, triggers body chemistry leaning towards fight/flight responses, disrupts sleep

None of this is necessarily at odds with the WaPo article, which appears to mostly claim that there are no increased mortality/chronic disease risks associated with high coffee consumption (and some decreased risk of diabetes/cardiovascular risk?).

<comment><USER7> This should be taken with a huge grain of salt: The article pointed is dated Feb 2015 but see all these articles:

[1] from September 2014

[2] from Feb 2015

[3] from September 2014

[6] : From August _2012_

All from this "Dr. Travis ..." . They all quote "New research from Johns Hopkins Medical School" , without ever giving the source of that research. If you google a bit for it you will find some information from Johns Hopkins University[4] : "Caffeine Has Positive Effect on Memory"; some study [5] from The Johns Hopkins Precursors Study in 2002 (so hardly "new") discuss about coffee, but "these associations were not statistically significant". You will notice that from August 2012 to February 2015, it was always "New research"

In conclusion, this LinkedIn blog post (from which all articles copy/paste from) lacks a lot of sources, especially if written by someone who holds a dual Ph.D. in clinical and industrial-organizational psychology (according to his Forbes personal page).

[1] [http://www.ihcus.com/2014/09/11/the-effects-of- coffee-](http://www.ihcus.com/2014/09/11/the-effects-of-coffee-) helpful-or- harmful/

[2][http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-drinking-one-cup- of...](http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-drinking-one-cup-of-coffee- each-day-is-killing-your-success-2015-2)

[3] [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140908162020-50578967-caffe...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140908162020-50578967-caffeine- the-silent-killer-of-success)

[4] [http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/stories/caffeine_memory....](http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/stories/caffeine_memory.html)

[5] [http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=21133...](http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=211334)

[6] : [http://www.forbes.com/sites/travisbradberry/2012/08/21/caffe...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/travisbradberry/2012/08/21/caffeine- the-silent-killer-of-emotional-intelligence/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ha, I just noticed a referenced story below this one:

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/07/14/a...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/07/14/almost- half-of-the-world-actually-prefers-instant-coffee/)

Me too!

I used to hunt for freshly and properly roasted quality beans, and grind them myself before each brew, and all that.

What I have come to this this: few coffees compare to Nescafe Gold a.k.a. Taster's Choice.

Certainly nothing that you can order around town from places like ####bucks or whatever.

Those Nestle buggers have figured out how to make great testing freeze-dried coffee. And it's so consistent! I've drank the stuff under different names on different continents, and it's exactly the same. (Modulo minor variations like "blend" or "dark roast").

And it's so cheap and easy just to throw a teaspoon of brown powder into hot water. Why bother with anything else.

Whenever I happen to have a coffee somewhere (socially, since I'd never do such a thing by myself any more) I'm actually wishing that the damn slop was Nescafe Gold!

<comment><USER9> I feel the title of that article is misleading. From the article:

'"The markets where instant coffee is most popular tend to be the ones without a strong tradition of coffee drinking," Dana LaMendola, and industry analyst at Euromonitor, said in an interview. "It's basically an entry point."'

So it's not that people prefer one over the other, it's because they don't have much of a coffee culture and people don't really care about the quality of their coffee. Saying you prefer instant coffee to quality, roasted beans is like saying you prefer a prepackaged, microwavable dinner to a properly cooked meal.

<comment><USER10> Or, places with a "strong tradition of coffee drinking" are resistant to change independent of actual quality -- because coffee is ritualized -- and so tend not to prefer instant coffee even to cheap (in the quality rather than price sense) roasted beans.

<comment><USER9> That's ridiculous. Would you say the same about areas where people consume more microwaved dinners over cooked meals? That the people cooking their meals are just resistant to change?

<comment><USER10> > That the people cooking their meals are just resistant to change?

That's not what I said in the coffee case; I said that the preference _differences_ between places with strong coffee traditions and those without may be partially due to the fact that having a strong tradition of coffee drinking _includes_ a culture attached to the ritual of preparation.

I did not say that the people _in_ an area that has a relatively strong preference for instant who individually do not are "just resistant to change".

That being said, you certainly might see something similar in regional distribution of preferences for prepackaged foods vs. freshly-prepared foods that aren't explained by other socioeconomic factors, though I'd expect that "food" is general enough that you it would be a very weak factor (though probably much stronger if you look at _specific_ foods rather than "food" as a whole.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's weird that the panel didn't take into account the harmful effects of disrupted sleep patterns. They did note a concern about the extra calories from milk and sugar added to coffee.

</comment><comment><USER12> I was _just_ debating whether to go out for coffee now, or in an hour. Now it is!

Most people I work with splash a lot of cream and sugar in their coffee - probably hurts the study.

</comment><comment><USER13> I decided to give up caffeine. I used to drink a lot of tea. I thought maybe it was making me anxious + using caffeine as a stimulant is a zero-sum game.

<comment><USER14> You don't have to necessarily give up tea because you've given up caffeine. There are lots of no-caffeine teas out there (many of which are quite good).

I've (largely) given up caffeine as well, but I still enjoy a warm cup of tea in the morning, especially in winter. :)

<comment><USER13> Yeah I drink a thing called 'barley cup' its grand!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is it possible to get these supposed benefits from coffee if it's decaf?

<comment><USER16> The research is quite focused on caffeine but mentions some benefit from decaf:

[http://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015-scientific- report/1...](http://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015-scientific- report/14-appendix-e2/e2-39a.asp)

<comment><USER6> From the link:

"Coffee consumption was associated with reduced risk of total mortality (3-4% lower mortality with 1 cup/day), especially cardiovascular mortality" "Decaffeinated coffee consumption was associated with a lower risk of death"

This makes it sound like coffee consumption helps and decaf consumption helps more when it comes to mortality risks.

Also, if I'm reading it right, that link says unfiltered caffeinated increases LDL blood levels, which I'm given to understand is bad.

It sounds like decaf is better...

<comment><USER16> I read "Decaffeinated coffee consumption was associated with a lower risk of death" to mean that they lack sufficient data to quantify it, not as a comparison to caffeinated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you are someone that doesn't eat many vegetables or take vitamins, I can see why coffee would be recommended. It does contain a very high amount of flavanols antioxydants... I'm not a big fan of the caffeine however.

<comment><USER18> Caffeine is a surprisingly benign "drug" (especially since it appears to have evolved as a natural insecticide).

Personally, I'm not a "fan" of taking vitamins.

<comment><USER13> Yes. Isn't there no evidence in favour of taking vitamin supplement? And recently mounting evidence that in fact it may be harmful if anything?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This world is clearly not meant for those of us who dislike coffee :-(

<comment><USER20> And alcohol. I think I'll just say I'm a Muslim or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Tomorrow there will be a study that says coffee is poison, and the next day it will be a miracle cure. It's difficult to take these arguments seriously when they're countered almost daily.

Life is about taking calculated risks. I prefer the moderation route.

<comment><USER18> The whole "they'll keep saying the opposite thing anyway" argument is tired. Sure, there have been prominent reversals, but usually behind it is an industry lobby group, not science.

There have been studies attempting to show coffee is harmful for decades (basically, there seems to be a general suspicion that anything people enjoy is probably harmful), and the results have been consistently ambiguous or in favor of coffee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If your sole purpose of drinking coffee is for the caffeine, caffeine pills are a great alternative. Sure there is a lot of negative stigmatism around pills in general, but they are significantly cheaper and more effective than drinking pure coffee.

</comment><comment><USER23> It frustrates me that they never give the official name of the panel.

</comment><comment><USER24> This article doesn't mention quantity in standard unit like ml and doesn't mention that coffee shouldn't be adulterated with pumps of sugars.

</comment><comment><USER25> How many cups of coffee do people drink in Seattle and Vancouver, and is that linked to their longevity?

<comment><USER26> Vancouver reporting in! Consumption is quite high from my anecdotal experience. I personally consume ~3-6 cups a day. I work in the tech field up here and that seems to be pretty standard.

<comment><USER6> And since the tech industry is known for its high concentration of workers productive well into their later decades... ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Does this 3 cups is of expresso, filtered, or the watery stuff common in USA?

<comment><USER4> 3 cups of espresso would be a fantastic amount of coffee. You'd actually have a medical condition of you drank that much espresso every day:

~64 mg caffeine / ounce in espresso

64 mg/ounce * 8 ounces * 3 = 1536 mg

From wikipedia: "Consumption of 1000–1500 mg per day is associated with a condition known as caffeinism."

<comment><USER28> I imagine when most people say 'a cup of espresso' they're thinking of a demitasse of the stuff, not using '1 cup' in the unit-of-volume sense (which'd be an ~octuple espresso)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> That might be kind of tough. We're already taking it via IV.

</comment><comment><USER30> Not so healthy with cream and sugar...</comment>


The Uber Engineering Tech Stack, Part I: The Foundation - <AUTHOR> https://eng.uber.com/tech-stack-part-one/ <comment><USER3> It's interesting that they don't break the problem apart geographically. It's inherent in Uber that you're local. But their infrastructure isn't organized that way. Facebook originally tried to do that, then discovered that, as they grew, friends weren't local. Uber doesn't need to have one giant worldwide system.

Most of their load is presumably positional updates. Uber wants both customers and drivers to keep their app open, reporting position to Master Control. There have to be a lot more of those pings than transactions. Of course, they don't have to do much with the data, although they presumably log it and analyze it to death.

The complicated part of the system has to be matching of drivers and rides. Not much on that yet. Yet that's what has to work well to beat the competition, which is taxi dispatchers with paper maps, phones, and radios.

<comment><USER4> I work on an uber-like system, but with ~3 backend devs rather than 100s.

We made the opposite decision, cloning our full stack for each new market.

That's great for scalability, but is a nightmare for devops.

If anything we want to find a way to move to one global system, And then slice down the bits that can be local:

Eg. Create a local order matching service, but keep orders, payments, and user accounts global

<comment><USER5> As far as I'm aware, Hailo (>3 backend devs, not quite 100s) did exactly this as well, and the ex-Hailo devs I've spoken to considered it a pretty bad move. It took them ages to refactor into a global system if I remember rightly.

<comment><USER4> Yep, I had a long chat with one of their engineers (Matt Heath) and seems like they had the exact same problems we have.

And solved it with their restructure and move to microservices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd love to know how many people are responsible for devops/operations/app at various stages of any company's journey. Wikipedia says Uber employs 6,500 people so if even 15% of that is on the tech side of the business that's still 1,000+ people allocated to tech. I think this metric would be a useful reality check for a "modern" SaaS project with 3-10 people that's trying to emulate a backend structure similar to the big league.

There are 20+ complex tools listed in the stack, and to run a high-visibility production system would require high level of expertise with most of them. Docker, Cassandra, React, ELK, WebGL are not related in required skills/knowledge at all (as, for example, Go and C are). Is it 5 bright guys and girls managing everything, like the React time within Facebook? Or a team dedicated just to log analytics?

<comment><USER7> That's all bloat. Pure and simple. At the end of the day Uber just does routing and basic allocation. It's a simple operations problem that has been solved since the 70s and no one back then needed ELK, Docker, Cassandra, etc.

I've seen this bloat everywhere. It is usually a result of internal politics and posturing by management types. The kinds of people Steve Jobs would have called B and C players. Now the actual people operations is another matter entirely but the tech stack definitely doesn't need to be that complicated.

<comment><USER3> I have to admit, I could see this running for a city the size of SF on a desktop machine under the table at the taxi depot. Uber has 11,000 drivers in SF, but probably only a few thousand are on at any one time. A ride takes a few minutes, so if you figure 3,000 active drivers and 4 rides per hour, that's only about 3 ride transactions per second. You have a transaction at ordering, one at ride start, and one at ride end. Plus you have tracking of where all the active drivers are, pinging maybe once a minute. That adds up to only at 10-20TPS. You can offload the routine web and app stuff to some front end machines. And you want to do some analysis every minute or two to see where there are "surges".

The only non-trivial part of this is assigning drivers to rides.

<comment><USER8> It's easy to imagine the simplest stack that can serve the core features of any service, and that is well served by a single box. What's missing from the picture is the infrastructure to replicate this 500 times by separate teams, monitoring all of it, backup, auditing, aggregating customer and business metrics, back-office systems, and more. Plus the fact that these things always grow organically and embed a host of imperfect decisions - the imaginary system will always be better designed.

<comment><USER9> This. Armchair software architecture is so easy when you can gloss over the details that make a product great.

Also routing, ETAs, geocoding/search, etc.

WebGL visualizations and such are probably overkill, but if it makes the company more fun to work for then it probably breaks even, at worst.

<comment><USER5> Couldn't agree more. It's all the invisible details that cause the load.

It's a much more trivial example, but highlights the point well I think - <USER2> have pages in the app I work on that would respond in ~100ms, but might have a single sentence on them that takes another 100ms to generate because of the complex data relationships involved in figuring out what that sentence needs to say. The 'request handler' might be 20 lines of code, with a 50 line util function to generate that line of text. No armchair architect will ever take into account things like that, but the end result is a page that is just a bit more personalised to the user and therefore improves their experience.

In an app of any real size, I imagine there are anywhere from hundreds to many thousands of tiny little details like this that all together drastically increase the amount of power needed to run a service.

<comment><USER10> > No armchair architect will ever take into account things like that

An armchair architect would say it's not needed. They would question whether spending 50% of your response time generating a single sentence is in any way worth it, and wonder what kind of architectural mistakes led to that.

<comment><USER11> The problem with this line of reasoning is that it implies the business exists to serve the software. Unless you work at a tech-focused non-profit, the software actually exists to serve the business.

<comment><USER10> > the software actually exists to serve the business.

Sure it does, but the business also wouldn't exist without the tech in Ubers case (and a lot of other cases). And it's going to be your head on the line when you keep adding these 100ms sentences because the business wants it for no good reason and your page takes 3 seconds to load, and nobody buys anything from the site.

<comment><USER12> You're making the assumption that the additional features slowing down the service aren't adding value.

More common is a "death by 1000 cuts" scenario where the various causes of slowness are apparent to the developers, but quite difficult to remove because they've become necessary to the continued success of the business.

<comment><USER10> > You're making the assumption that the additional features slowing down the > service aren't adding value.

No, I'm questioning whether the value added is greater than the value lost, and in this hypothetical example clearly not. So it's your job to point that out to whoever and not silently obey.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Uber is really strapped for engineering talent. Especially when it comes for SRE. Myself and many friends working SRE at various Bay Area companies get consistently hit up for free lunches and interviews. It's really weird considering that their stack doesn't NEED to be this complex....

<comment><USER14> It probably could be more simplistic. It seems like with enough engineers every company I've ever worked at eventually ends up using every technology they can because of the _one_ thing it does well.

<comment><USER15> >because of the _one_ thing it does well.

This "one thing it does well" business is then presented as : "using the right tool for the right job" and it's difficult to argue against that because the counterpart can easily deride you as a fanatic of some technology, someone not objective enough, etc...

It is however interesting that we used relational databases for virtually everything for decades even though SQL is suboptimal at most things if we take them in isolation. Some will argue that people are now realizing their mistake, but the truth is these companies were successful and we were all getting our paychecks. (PS: I choose to use NoSQL for virtually all my projects)

The real driver shouldn't be _the one thing it does well_. Many times - if not most of the time - it's preferable to use a tool optimal for the most important parts and suboptimal for the rest. I personally prefer to provision two more instances, than to add two more technology stacks.

<comment><USER16> > It is however interesting that we used relational databases for virtually > everything for decades even though SQL is suboptimal at most things

You have no clue what SQL or ACIDity is. For 99% of the cases SQL/RDBMS is the right choice. You probably think you belong in that 1%, but from your comment, I suspect you do not.

> I choose to use NoSQL for virtually all my projects

That's because you have no important data to store.

When you get to store data that are important to your customers you're gonna have a big revelation.

<comment><USER15> >You have no clue what SQL or ACIDity is.

That's quite an attack. I trained for an Expert SQL certification from Microsoft back then, when I was writing 3000K+ long stored procedures to migrate an Access application at a fortune 40 company. So I know what it is and I know quite a good deal about RDBMS. I'm not among those who criticize what they don't know.

Regarding the gist of your comment on NoSQL, I haven't been able to convince people coming from where you are with two days of meetings in a row, so I'm fairly confident I'm not going to change your mind on HN.

<comment><USER16> If you have a clue, as you say, and still believe that it's a good idea to store critical data with NoSQL then I don't know what to say.

Obviously you don't care enough that _almost every_ NoSQL solution out there has been found to make false claims about their guarantees. The billions that have been sunk in the blackhole that's called NoSQL in the last decade is unprecedented.

You don't have to change my mind. I have(and still use) both. And I still maintain that people who use NoSQL for 99% of their projects are making the wrong choice.

<comment><USER17> So I think a lot of people agree with you on

> Many people choose the wrong tool for the job

I think that is far past database choice. I think many people build SPAs that end up hurting the product over a traditional setup. I think many people use microservices where a monolith would have much better performance and reliability.

As for the basic premise

> that people who use NoSQL for 99% of their projects are making the wrong > choice.

Is perhaps kinda right? Some people may really only touch giant data sets. So for them always using NOSQL is smart. The people that write webapps with 12 users? More questionable.

Most cases you can decide if you need to leave RBMS with something like.

1) Do you need to store in the next year > 100GB of data that you need to access in realtime?

2) Do you need in the next year to store > 1TB of data that you need to access in semi-realtime?

3) Do you need in the next year to handle > 1000 writes per second?

4) Do you need in the next year to handle > 1000 reads per second?

Not a perfect guide, and I am sure you can think of edge cases that can still be dealt with in a RDBMS.. but it is a decent starting place. One tricky part is that if you are optimistic, almost any app can check off #3 or #4 (Like Uber but for Baby Strollers). Knowing how to realistically estimate demand for a possibly viral startup is hard.

<comment><USER16> The above is good as a rule of thumb indeed.

Another one that I'd add is: \- "Are the records in _each_ table in the hundred of millions? Then most probably you'll do fine with an RDBMS".

If you go above that, or you have operations that will extrapolate that number in the billions then you can offload them into whatever non-RDBMS storage you want and do your thing. But that's the thing with RDBMS, you can always move(or offload part of) your data to a non-RDBMS solution _afterwards_.

But doing the inverse? I wouldn't want to be in that person's shoes ;)

<comment><USER17> Does row count matter that much compared to data size? I.e. if I have a billion rows but they are 2 32-bit ints, that isn't a lot of data (2 GB + index). I guess the index starts to get pretty big.. but I always just think of raw data size vs # of rows.

<comment><USER16> Remember, it's just a rule of thumb. Now... tables with 2 32-bit ints as columns are not exactly typical RDBMS data.

Also, data in RDBMS are... well relational :) Meaning, the rows of just one table are not that important. The data are going to be queried and combined with data from other tables. And I know that typical relational data that consist of hundreds of millions of entries in each table is something that most DBs can handle.

Again, rule of thumb :D

<comment><USER17> Fair enough!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What I'm really wondering about is their app. The UI of the app can be impacted without an app update. For example the UI during the pride parade. Or minute of silence ( [http://gizmodo.com/uber-makes-riders-take-a-moment-of- silenc...](http://gizmodo.com/uber-makes-riders-take-a-moment-of-silence-for- gun-viol-1783391098) )

I wonder what's the architecture of the app and the API for this.

<comment><USER19> If its updating without your consent to upgrade in the app store then its a webview youre looking at and they are just updating the webview.

<comment><USER9> I don't think it's that simple. The distinction between "code" and "data" is somewhat arbitrary. I'm sure Uber could get away with a rules engine that supports the cases the parent comment is talking about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Quite an intricate architecture. I can't help but wonder if all of the complexity and different moving parts are worth it. Does it really make more sense than throwing more resources at a monolithic web service? Clearly the folks at Uber think it does, and they've obviously thought about the problem more than me, but I'd love to understand the reasoning.

<comment> UK-AL There's only so far throwing more resources at a monolithic app can take you.

At a certain scale you have to turn distributed. Uber is at a large scale

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is just about all the tech there is, right?

</comment><comment><USER22> 'wildly complex' wow. and they now have 'eaters'

</comment><comment><USER23> "We use Docker containers on Mesos to run our microservices with consistent configurations scalably, with help from Aurora for long-running services and cron jobs."

</comment><comment><USER24> > Screenshots show Uber's rider app in [...] China

Interesting to see Google maps being used, isn't that blocked in mainland China?

<comment><USER25> US phones roaming in China aren't blocked from using Google services, they may make an exception for Uber too.

Here's what it looked like for me last May: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/9rkor22hn3q6z5t/IMG_2183.jpg?dl=0](https://www.dropbox.com/s/9rkor22hn3q6z5t/IMG_2183.jpg?dl=0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Anyone know if Uber supports the projects they use with human and financial resources?

</comment><comment><USER27> So much technology, yet I still had to load the site 3 times and fiddle with uMatrix to get the page to scroll. Now, lots of people do silly things with javascript, but on a blog article on your tech stack it doesn't speak well of things.

</comment><comment><USER28> This sounds like a blog post for emphasizing the more buzz word you use the better.

</comment><comment><USER29> If it is easy, it'd be nice to edit this the title to be not in all caps.

</comment><comment><USER20>

<comment><USER30> In fairness, the title of the original article is in ALL CAPS (due to text- transform: uppercase), so don't assume malice on the OP's part.

<comment><USER31> In Firefox, copypasting text-transform:uppercased text retains its pre- transform case. I'm a little sad that feature isn't in Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> For those of you complaining about the title being all caps, it was done so for aesthetic purposes. Which means somehow the submitter went through the time to uppercase each character of the HN title before submitting.

        text-transform: uppercase;

<comment><USER33> What are you talking about? If you copy-paste the title you get all caps.

<comment><USER32> Oops, I didn't know the behavior persists.

<comment><USER34> I think that this is new though. I don't think it used to be like this (?). I'm on Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Sounds like a very solid foundation! I'm glad to see they have sufficient system in place to continue spamming the heck out of people who never opted into their advertisement in the first place.

/sarcasm

I only wish LE would treat CAN-SPAM seriously and put more sources into criminal enforcement.

</comment><comment><USER36> I just got rejected from them. I applied for a SE position, but they didn't like me I guess. They send you this really condescending rejection letter. I showed them my programming language that I built in C from scratch, and also my data structure library where I implement all the common data structures found in high level languages that I built from scratch in C, among the many projects

I have. It must have been my state school that turned them off. I know I could keep up there, but maybe they also turned me down because I'm 5 states away and they thought I wasn't worth the recruiters time.

edit: downvoter, if you could provide your rationale that would be great.

<comment><USER30> You are likely getting downvoted because it is off-topic, at best.</comment></comment>


On Having Enough Socks - mighty-fine https://www.gwern.net/Socks <comment><AUTHOR> I'm stunned that Samsung tab a survey about socks to launch a new washing machine

</comment><comment><USER2> Aha turns out the quest to build an AI dictator is just a desire to have a mom look after your stuff again.</comment>


Ask HN: Can a human beat a computer at chess, today? - <AUTHOR> Deep Blue vs. Kasparov game happened 22 years ago. What is the state of chess program vs. humans (say Magnus Carlsen)? Is there any chance for a human to beat the computer? Or is settled for good now? <comment><USER2> A human can, if it's the right computer under the right time controls, and you get lucky. [https://youtu.be/Ya1FYUiuVgM](https://youtu.be/Ya1FYUiuVgM)

</comment><comment><USER3> Even if you use stockfish on a high end mobile phone, there is no human that can beat it. Standard or rapid. It doesn't matter.

There is absolutely no contest between humans and computers. Even Nakamura with an older version of rybka lost against stockfish.

This is like asking if a human can win a boxing match against a car.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's settled for good. There's no serious contest a human can give a computer at chess anymore.

Since Google also conquered Go, the next game they're working on is Starcraft 2.

</comment><comment><USER5> Only one way. A good old a baseball bat.</comment>


Seagate to buy LaCie for $186m as hard drive industry continues shrinking - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/23/3038560/seagate-to-buy-lacie-for-186m-as-hard-drive-industry-continues <comment><USER2> Nnnnooooooooo! Here's hoping they don't screw it up. I love LaCie design. Would be a shame to see it compromised.</comment>


1215095 – The Flash Boys Mystery Solved? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.themistrading.com/1215095-the-flash-boys-mystery-solved/

<comment><USER2> Sorry, not having read the book and with just this blog post as context I don't understand the problem. Why wouldn't an HFT company want to own a microwave tower that transmits stock prices? why is that unethical? seems perfectly reasonable and like it would be a useful to the business. Am I missing out on some piece of information.

<comment><USER3> I think the blog post is trying (and failing) to encourage a sense of moral outrage that the SEC, who is the watchdog agency for some HFT firms, is buying services from an HFT firm.

They are piggy backing on the press from the book (the blog post is from months ago when the book came out) to bring this back into the conversation as it has been clear for some time that the SEC is paying for technology from an HFT firm. The book doesn't point this out by the way, but it was public knowledge.

Personally, I'd like to know who is in a better position to provide the technologies to understand HFT than a HFT firm? I would be suspicious of any vendor that claimed they could provide a platform for this that wasn't in the industry.

Also, as a bit of context Themis Trading (the blog posters) is an execution trading house. That is, they make their money by making trades for large institutions with the express value add of being able to get the lowest execution prices. This is precisely the kind of thing HFT has made cheap/redundant. That is they are natural competitors to HFT firms.

<comment><USER4> It may be true that there are no disinterested players in this debate. But his overall point is that the SEC paid an HFT firm to supply systems that would be used to oversee HFT, and that seems worth repeating regardless of his own interest in the matter.

<comment><USER5> Not really, Thesys is a technology provider to many firms. Providers include financial services firms, trading companies and regulation authorities. If the SEC purchased the technology (Or spend more money to build it themselves) they would be ridiculed for having inferior technology.

<comment><USER6> The point is that the people providing the technology have an interest in the SEC not deciding to push for additional, non-HFT friendly market rules.

Is it possible that there's no way to get it besides from a company which might/probably/definitely have a conflict of interest? Yes. Does that somehow negate said conflict of interest? No.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It has been a while since the book was published; and yet it wasn't mainstream media that brought this fact and the conflict of interest it entailed to the fore.

<comment><USER3> Just as a heads up that blog post is half a year old. It came out shortly after the book.</comment></comment>


Colleges reduce cost of teaching, raise tuitions - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2008/0811.carey.html

<comment><USER2> This article is premised on the idea that colleges are selling education. Colleges sell a credential and I suppose a token to access the reputation and ability of other credential holders.

The credential is the scarce good whereas education is increasingly free. It makes sense that they'd focus on pricing related to the credential rather than the education.

I think people are buying the college's recruiting filter and its reputation first and the college's education second.

<comment><USER3> +1, More and more true. Plus there is never an incentive for universities to lower price.

<comment><USER4> There is if they can't fill the seats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think that something like the Math Emporium could represent an excellent additional resource ... but using it to replace lectures altogether would seem, to me, to be a missed opportunity and a big mistake. I hope that they at least have something like recitations / TA-led classes so that students can get face time with, periodically, with someone knowledgeable w/re to the subject matter.

Also, the article says "The key is letting computers do what they do best - grading multiple-choice tests, [...]".

That's alarming because it suggests that the automatically generated practice tests and possibly even the real, proctored tests in the Math Emporium scheme are all multiple-choice. For exams in introductory, memorization-heavy humanities courses, that's fine, but the multiple-choice format is ill-suited for math. There's no way to assign partial credit for wrong answers and, more importantly, there's no capability to examine the steps that the student took when trying to find the solution to a given problem so that their mistake can be explained to them.

Based on the article, it sounds as though Virginia Tech is replacing part of their undergrad math curriculum with Kumon (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumon>) for grown-ups. Depressing.

<comment><USER6> The online hw and tests that I have worked with for math classes are fill in the blank with the correct answer. The computer refuses incorrect answers and will give them a specified number of retries Its a pretty savvy way to save time, especially on hw and gives students instant feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wish I had the math emporium for my entire degree and every single course, because the quality would of been better every single bloody time.</comment>